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“I don’t think there’s much political mileage in focusing on the law,” said Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation. “The law is a political symbol of differences.”

Still, Pelosi — one of the biggest champions of the health care law when she served as House speaker — would like to see a stronger connection. She lamented what she sees as a disconnect between the law’s pieces and the whole.

“I bet you if you went to a pharmacy right now and you saw a senior purchasing prescription drugs — and those drugs are cheaper now because of the bill — they would not relate it to the Affordable Care Act,” she said.

White House press secretary Jay Carney insists that Obama still talks about the law, not just its parts. “He will continue to talk about why it’s important to have health care reform, why it’s so important not to go back to the past where insurance companies got to write their own rules, where they could throw you off whenever they wanted to … they could deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, to children with pre-existing conditions,” Carney said.

But Carney also acknowledges that Obama doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about some of the law’s biggest changes that won’t happen for years — like health exchanges, the marketplaces states will create to sell health insurance in 2014.

“There are a variety of provisions within it that have already delivered benefits. Of course, he’s going to talk about that,” Carney said. “Because of the pace of the implementation that was envisioned in the law, obviously, the exchanges aren’t in place yet, so the full positive effect of the law hasn’t been felt because it’s not been fully implemented yet.”

Obama’s rhetoric also positions himself well to defend the popular provisions if the Supreme Court decides to get rid of the law’s insurance reforms — or the entire thing.

Talking up the popular provisions “constitutes a promise that he’s going to find a way to preserve those things even if the mandate goes down,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

“He’s setting up the rhetoric to bridge the decision in case the mandate is held unconstitutional,” she said. “You know you’ve got to deal with this. So you better lay the rhetorical groundwork now for your post-Supreme Court decision.”

Mitt Romney has embraced at least one of the law’s popular pieces, too. He has promised that he’ll repeal the entire health law if the Supreme Court doesn’t overturn it first. But the former Republican governor of Massachusetts has also said he wants to prevent insurance companies from turning down customers with pre-existing conditions.

That idea is also a key, popular piece of Obama’s law, though Romney defines it more narrowly — guaranteeing coverage only to people who already have had insurance.

“We’re going to have to make sure the law we replace Obamacare with ensures that people who have a pre-existing condition — who’ve been insured in the past — are able to get insurance in the future so they don’t have to worry about that condition keeping them from getting the kind of health care they deserve,” Romney said earlier this month during a campaign stop in Orlando.

As for the unpopularity of the overall health care law, Hall Jamieson said that’s Obama’s fault. He should have given more speeches explaining that the expensive benefits need to be paid for with something like the individual mandate, she said.

“To turn a major legislative achievement into a liability is no small task. The fact they’ve managed to do that is a real indictment of the communications shop in this presidency,” Hall Jamieson said.

Both the donut hole and the benefits for young adults are easy to comprehend, but explaining the entire health law — not to mention the controversial mandate — is more complicated. White House officials struggled to explain insurance pools and actuarial values during the congressional debate, and they don’t sound very keen on trying again.

“Average people don’t understand it, so there’s no point in him going back and having that debate,” said Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health. “But he’s not going to win a love of the overall bill. He wants to win their vote.”

Readers' Comments (2)

a. At its core, the policy debate boils down to spending smart money or dumb money. Our current system spends enough dumb money to almost completely pay for covering everyone with good, basic health care. To me, that’s smart money.

b. We can’t get to lower costs without covering as many people as possible, because we would not reach the most expensive 10% of us who spend 2/3 of every health care dollar.

c The counter-intuitive nature of the reform law is explained by this: The best way to lower long-term, Macro health care costs is to keep Americans healthier. This is why new incentives support yearly check-ups and preventative screenings that catch disease early on, when it is easier (and cheaper) to treat.

d. The ACA is largely, the story of building the national capacity to measure quality, throughout the entire health care system.

Why couldn't the administration just say it straight? You know, like I do.